Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I hope everyone is having a good week so far; we're almost to the weekend, so let's take a look at some of the random books I've found in Little Free Libraries this week.

Sue me, I have a weakness for movie novelizations.  I know some of them are just toss-offs with maybe some photos inserted, but once in a while you get a work by Alan Dean Foster or Vonda McIntyre, both of who have done of ton of them and deepened the script they're working off, adding in fun details to their Star Wars (Foster) or Star Trek (McIntyre) novelizations.  (As a side note, Foster is currently in a huge dispute with Disney, noting that he is owed a lot of royalties for his Star Wars books.  I don't automatically think Disney is evil, but man are they not looking good on this one, apparently claiming they didn't take on the 20th Century Fox obligations to him, which is obvious BS.)  Anyway, this one is pretty down the middle (and frankly, the photo insert seems cheap).  This is definitely one where you should stick with the pretty good movie (and definitely the Director's Cut).

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Moving on to the highbrow, here we have a 1956 edition of Katherine Mansfield's Stories.  I'm pretty sure I read some of her work in high school but definitely not since then and I'm looking forward to dipping into this.  (And boy, does this feel like a mid-century Vintage book; it has a nice weight to it without feeling too stuffy and has that great acid-washed paper smell.)  Any fans of Mansfield who can tell me a story I should especially look out for here?

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As a member of the Irish Diaspora, I'm really interested to dig into this.  Keneally, who wrote the novel Schindler's Ark (which Schindler's List is based on) turned his attention to his own family (he's an Australian, the descendent of Irish who were transported to Australia, sometimes for the most minor of crimes) and various other stories of people who ended up in the USA, Canada and Britain and how they affected their countries (like one who ended up imprisoned with Jefferson Davis after the US Civil War, eventually returned to Ireland and became mayor of Tipperary).  

Incidentally, this is from the Nan A. Talese imprint at Doubleday.  Talese was an editor at Doubleday and other publishers for decades, one of those giants of the industry who shaped tastes for better or for worse (and one notable mistake, publishing A Million Little Pieces as a memoir without doing sufficient fact checking or James Frey's claims).  She just retired last year at 87.

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Ah, I love reading people, especially those who work in the movie and television industries, talking about their craft.  And this one, talking with a huge pile of directors about their very first film, is catnip for me.  Some of them are more familiar to me (like Kevin Smith talking about Clerks, but this is one where I love reading Smith's thoughts on things again) and some of them I have zero idea about (I'm intrigued to see James Mangold's Heavy, with Liv Tyler and Debbie Harry).  I do wish there were more women directors interviewed for this, but sometimes it's just who you can get for this sort of thing.  This came out in 2000, and it would be a good time for a follow up.

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Now here's something I haven't read quite a while, the source material for one of my favorite movie series.  It's fun, it's charming, the mystery doesn't quite make sense and that's kind of besides the point for this fun, twisty story.  I always love that, though your brain automatically thinks that's William Powell as Nick Charles there on the cover, but that is Dashiell Hammett, one of the most dapper American authors of the last century.  Dude is totally rocking that look and he's perfect for the cover of his own novel.  Sadly, this was his final novel; he was hounded, persecuted and imprisoned by the US government for not naming names during the stupid Red Scare and he never wrote anything again, essentially before dying impoverished.  A veteran of both World Wars (he was a fervent anti-fascist who somehow managed to re-enlist in WWII despite being a disabled veteran, TB survivor and Communist), he is buried in Arlington and at least he is now celebrated as one of the greatest mystery writers ever, with a massive influence on the genre.